The Real Nuclear Threat, Look at Kiev

Jan. 8, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—RT ran an analysis by former Ukrainian diplomat Olga Sukharevskaya on Jan. 6 documenting that, despite the claims made by Western officials and the compliant Western news media, the real nuclear risk emanates, not from Russia, but from the Kiev regime. It’s not that Kiev has nuclear weapons, but officials of the regime have proclaimed numerous times that it has the intention and the means of having nuclear weapons. RT notes, for example, that “the return of nuclear weapons” to Ukraine after Kiev gave them up in the early 1990s, is specifically cited as a goal in paragraph 2 of the Military Doctrine section in the program statement of the Patriot of Ukraine organization, while paragraph 7 of its Foreign Policy section reads: “The ultimate goal of Ukrainian foreign policy is world domination.” Patriot of Ukraine was created in 2014 by the notorious Andriy Biletsky, who formed it based on the ideology of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and had dreamed of Ukraine possessing nuclear weapons as early as 2007.

Few more examples: In 2009, neo-Nazi Oleh Tyahnybok (in Ukrainian) forced a regional government to send a message to the Kiev government insisting Ukraine “terminate the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 and retore Ukraine’s nuclear status.” In December 2018, the former representative of the Ukrainian mission to NATO, Maj. Gen. Petro Garashchuk, (in Ukrainian) told the news outlet Obozrevatel of the real possibility of Ukraine creating its own nuclear weapons. In 2019, Oleksandr Turchynov, who usurped power in Ukraine in February 2014 with the removal of elected President Viktor Yanukovych, and then was head of the National Security and Defense Council, called Ukraine’s renunciation of nuclear weapons a “historic mistake.” Following him, in April 2021, then-Ukrainian ambassador to Germany Andrij Melnyk, notoriously pro-Banderite, stated that if the West did not help Ukraine in its confrontation with Russia, the country would launch a nuclear program and create an atomic bomb. And on Feb. 19, 2022, before the start of Russia’s special military operation, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced at the Munich Security Conference that Ukraine has the right to abandon the Budapest Memorandum, which proclaimed the country’s nuclear-free status.

RT also goes into some detail about Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, including Kiev’s reckless disregard for nuclear plant safety, and the nuclear research facilities in Kharkov to make the argument that Ukraine has not only the intent but also the means to produce nuclear warheads. “All these facts mean that present-day Ukraine is arguably a real threat to nuclear security not just in Europe, but on a global scale,” RT concludes. “It has everything it would take, from irresponsible people in charge of safety and security at nuclear sites, to the technical capabilities.